


when all that's left is hurt

by Nabielka



Category: bare: A Pop Opera - Hartmere/Intrabartolo
Genre: Gen, Post-Canon, Vignette
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-07
Updated: 2017-12-07
Packaged: 2019-02-11 18:18:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 810
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12940983
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nabielka/pseuds/Nabielka
Summary: Some attitudes remain unchanged.





	when all that's left is hurt

The first thing her mother said to her afterwards, when everything was known, was, “We must agree on what to tell the family.”

From the hospital they had driven home in silence. Nadia, behind the driver’s seat where she had sat since childhood, had had her head turned aside to the point of pain, anything not to look at the vacant space at her side. Her mother’s nails had caught the light, her hands moving across the wheel; beside her, her father had been still in the darkness. He was gone now, upstairs perhaps, or had left altogether. Her mother’s hands were still holding a mug.

The old Nadia might have said something, but still she was there in that moment, that absence of time, when she, waiting for another scene, had looked out towards the audience, and a moment later Jason was on the ground. Even then, she had thought little of it: everybody slips, everybody falls, everybody else gets up again.

“We know what to tell them,” she said finally. Her arm was pressing against the wall. She moved into it, the hurt holding her up. She had no mug to clench her hands around, and her nails, always breaking, could not press hard enough against her palm to hold her to reality.

She meant the truth.

Her mother said, “Don’t be a child.”

She had never felt like less of one. Ivy’s revelations, Jason’s fall, all had added up to make her feel as though she had aged ten years in not even as many days. She thought, now I am older than he ever will be.

Still she could not understand how people like her mother arranged their lives, playing always to an audience that wasn’t there. This had enraged her for years. Now she only felt tired.

But she knew her mother a little, knew what arguments had, if not so much a chance of success, a lesser chance of failure. She could not speak of family, not when family had failed Jason so. She said instead, “The child can’t be hidden. Ivy can’t keep quiet.”

Ivy too had grown up, less perhaps in Jason’s fall than in her own, in that last fateful week at St. Cecilia’s. Her mother wasn’t rich; perhaps the money the McConnells might offer would convince her to keep the child well away.

Nadia had no intention of letting it happen. She still felt nothing warmer for Ivy than sympathy, but Jason was gone, and it might be a comfort to see some trace of him other than in the mirror, other than in her parents, who appeared for an hour or two and were not to be disturbed.

The poor thing was going to need all the relations it could scrounge up.

Her mother’s voice was cool in contemplation of a grandchild. “Oh, the child can’t be avoided now, but perhaps that’s for the better. Someone ought to carry on all the family’s worked for.”

She had another child, was talking to her even. For all her devotion to her own career, her mother had never had such expectations of achievement for her as her father had focused on Jason. Even after all these years, it still hurt.

But her mother was still talking, “What I meant, of course, was about the circumstances of – .” She hesitated. “Such a tragic event.” By her tone, she might have been providing a media soundbite. It might make the local news, might come up again when her mother was next interviewed. She would be prepared. To strangers, she always knew what to say.

Still, Nadia reflected, she was at least here. God alone knew where her father had gone. God and her father’s secretary.

It was of little comfort. When their grandmother had died, they had both cried, pressed against their mother. She had had more words of comfort then, comfort beyond their father's platitudes of heaven. Neither of them repeated them now.

Peter could keep quiet; he and Jason had kept quiet for so long. All that time, Nadia, who saw her brother every day, who vented to him about Ivy and listened in turn to his troubles over golf, basketball, and their parents, always their parents, had been as blind to it all as anyone. He would blame them for it for years, he would blame himself, blame St. Cecilia's and the Church's teaching too, perhaps, but he would not make a tabloid drama of his grief. Neither would he hide away; in years to come someone might look back and wonder.

Her mother did not know that. And yet Nadia was sick of it all: the constant lies, always the same question: how will it look. How could it look, a son dead like that?

As so often before with her mother, she found that she had little to say.

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote most of this in 2015 and left it to linger unfinished. Title is from Florence & The Machine.


End file.
